Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  In an attempt to pacify Weed, the president sent Nicolay to New York with a note stating that he had been “pained and surprised” to learn that Lord Thurlow felt “wounded.” Lincoln said he was “pained, because I very much wish you to have no unpleasant feeling proceeding from me, and surprised, because my impression is that I have seen you, since the last Message issued, apparantly feeling very cheerful and happy. How is this?”174

  Through Nicolay, Weed expressed concern for Lincoln’s political future. High-ranking officials in the New York customhouse, including the collector and his principal assistants, were working against his renomination, he warned. Moreover, the appraiser’s bureau “had been engaged in treasonably aiding the rebellion.” In January 1864, Lincoln had told Weed that he would look into the matter, but by late March he had done nothing about replacing the “incapable and unworthy” men who infested not only the customhouse but also the cabinet, which, in Weed’s view, was “notoriously weak and inharmonious—no Cabinet at all—gives the President no support. Welles is a cypher, Bates a fogy, and Blair at best a dangerous friend.” Moreover, even though “Chase was not formidable as a candidate in the field,” still “by the shrewd dodge of a withdrawal” the treasury secretary was “likely to turn up again with more strength than ever.” Weed protested to Nicolay that his highest ambition was “not to get office for himself, but to assist in putting good men in the right places. If he was good for anything, it was as an outsider to give valuable suggestions to an administration that would give him its confidence.” He feared that he did not enjoy Lincoln’s complete confidence and that the president “only regarded him with a certain degree of leniency” and as “not quite so great a rascal as his enemies charged him with being.”175

  In August 1864, Lincoln once again sent Nicolay to placate Weed. Lord Thurlow and Henry J. Raymond urged that immediate changes be made in the leadership of the customhouse. Nicolay found the assignment “very delicate, disagreeable and arduous” but derived satisfaction from his ability to help broker a deal. Hiram Barney, collector, and Rufus Andrews, surveyor, were replaced by Simeon Draper and Abram Wakeman, respectively. Those changes, along with others in several lesser customhouse posts, and the appointment of James Kelly as postmaster of New York, satisfied Weed. Nicolay asked Barney to resign “as a personal and political favor of great value & importance” to the president, for it would “relieve him from political embarrassments” and lay “him under great obligations.” Nicolay assured him of Lincoln’s “personal kind regard and continued friendship.”176 To demonstrate his goodwill, the president intended to offer Barney the post of minister to Portugal.

  Draper’s appointment displeased some Republicans. John Murray Forbes called him “a mere pipe layer & wire puller—windy, pompous, and with a very damaged mercantile reputation.”177 Gideon Welles termed the appointment of the “corrupt” Draper “abominable” and predicted that it “will beget distrust in the Administration.”178

  At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, similar problems emerged. The head of the New York Union State Committee reported to Henry J. Raymond that almost half of the employees at that huge facility “are hostile to the present Administration, and will oppose the reelection of Mr. Lincoln. Of this number there are Mechanics in the different departments who must be retained, but I have no doubt that of the 6,000 to 7,000 employed it will not be necessary for the efficient working of the departments to retain as many as 1,000 who are opposed to us.”179 Raymond wanted to fire workers there who did not support the administration, and to assess each employee 5 percent of his pay to line the party’s coffers. Political assessments were common in other departments, but Gideon Welles forbade them at navy yards. Unable to make progress with the navy secretary, Weed and Raymond pestered Lincoln, who said he would defer to Welles. But the navy secretary doubted that the president would long resist the New Yorkers’ pressure. Lincoln’s “convictions and good sense will place him with me,” Welles speculated, but Weed and Raymond “will alarm him with forebodings of disaster if he is not vindictive.”180 The secretary was right, for in October dozens of workmen in the Brooklyn Yard were dismissed on political grounds.

  Lincoln did not, however, make all the changes desired by New York politicos. To one of them, who demanded the removal of an official who opposed the president’s renomination, Lincoln impatiently snapped: “You cannot think _____ to be half as mean to me as I know him to be, but I can not run this thing upon the theory that every officeholder must think I am the greatest man in the nation, and I will not.” The offending critic kept his job.181 Similarly, Lincoln restored an officer to the army after Stanton had dismissed him for giving a pro-McClellan speech. “Supporting General McClellan for the Presidency is no violation of army regulations,” said the president, adding puckishly that “as a question of taste of choosing between him and me, well, I’m the longest, but he’s better looking.”182 When warned that he was about to appoint a bitter opponent of his renomination to an important post, Lincoln remarked: “I suppose that Judge —, having been disappointed before, did behave pretty ugly; but that wouldn’t make him any less fit for this place, and I have a Scriptural authority for appointing him. You recollect that while the Lord on Mount Sinai was getting out a commission for Aaron, that same Aaron was at the foot of the mountain making a false god, a golden calf, for the people to worship; yet Aaron got his commission, you know.” On another occasion, Lincoln appointed a former opponent over the objections of current friends. To them Lincoln observed that no one “will deny that he is a first-rate man for the place, and I am bound to see that his opposition to me personally shall not interfere with my giving the people a good officer.”183

  The changes in the New York customhouse did not please everyone. The Greeley faction of the party was especially upset. “I am so utterly disgusted with Lincoln’s behavior that I cannot muster respectful terms in which to write him,” grumbled William Cullen Bryant.184 Rumor had it that Weed was still discontent and spoke disparagingly of Lincoln two days before the election in the hopes of defeating him in New York.

  Another internecine battle in New York irritated Lincoln. A substantial number of Republican leaders in former Congressman Roscoe Conkling’s upstate district announced that they would not support his candidacy even though the party had officially nominated him. Lincoln wrote: “I am for the regular nominee in all cases; and that no one could be more satisfactory to me as the nominee in that District, than Mr. Conkling. I do not mean to say there [are] not others as good as he in the District; but I think I know him to be at least good enough.”185

  Indiana Congressman George W. Julian confronted a similar problem when a newspaper controlled by Commissioner of Patents David P. Holloway refused to support him for reelection, after the incumbent had won the party’s primary. When Julian complained to Lincoln, the president assured him: “Your nomination is as binding on Republicans as mine, and you can rest assured that Mr. Holloway shall support you, openly and unconditionally, or lose his head.” Upon learning that Holloway ignored his directive to do so, Lincoln called for his messenger and exclaimed: “Tell Mr. Holloway to come to me!” Taken aback by the president’s unwonted vehemence, the messenger hesitated, prompting an even more emphatic order: “Tell Mr. Holloway to come to me!”186 The commissioner’s newspaper soon endorsed Julian.

  Lincoln also had to intervene when the postmaster of Philadelphia, Cornelius Walborn, refused to back Congressman William D. Kelley for reelection. The president summoned Walborn and gently chided him: “Complaint is made to me that you are using your official power to defeat Judge Kell[e]y’s renomination to Congress. I am well satisfied with Judge Kell[e]y as an M.C. and I do not know that the man who might supplant him would be as satisfactory; but the correct principle, I think, is that all our friends should have absolute freedom of choice among our friends. My wish therefore is that you will do just as you think fit with your own suffrage in the case, and not constrain any of your subordinates to do other than
as he thinks fit with his.”187 Walborn promised to do as told, but he did not; when informed that almost all of the hundreds of postmasters under his jurisdiction were opposing Kelley, Lincoln asked an influential Philadelphia Republican to instruct Walborn that “he must find a way to relieve me from the suspicion that he is not keeping his promise to me in good faith.”188 Kelley won reelection. When John Locke Scripps, postmaster at Chicago and an old friend of Lincoln, refused to support Congressman Isaac N. Arnold’s reelection bid, the president sent him a copy of the letter to Walborn.

  Lincoln’s remarkable ability to harmonize factions helped assure his reelection and Northern victory in the war. To Leonard Swett, he remarked: “I may not have made as great a President as some other men, but I believe I have kept these discordant elements together as well as anyone could.”189

  In addition to New York, Lincoln worried about the Border States, whose voters, like many Conservatives throughout the North, disliked both the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of black troops. In Missouri, Charcoals and Clay-banks continued to wrangle. To combat their chronic divisiveness, Lincoln dispatched Nicolay to St. Louis, where he spent a week conferring with various Republican leaders. The young emissary managed to promote enough harmony so that Republicans swept the state that fall. In the summer, when a leading Claybank, Charles Gibson, publicly resigned his government post with a blast at the Baltimore platform, Lincoln wrote a response that went out over the signature of Hay: the president “thanks Mr. Gibson for his acknowledgment that he has been treated with personal kindness and consideration; and he says he knows of but two small draw-backs upon Mr. Gibson’s right to still receive such treatment, one of which is that he never could learn of his giving much attention to the duties of his office, and the other is this studied attempt of Mr. Gibson’s to stab him.”190

  Hostility to Lincoln had grown especially acute in Kentucky. “The nigger is Kentucky politics,” reported an Ohioan serving as the collector of customs at Louisville. He caustically and accurately summarized the attitude of Unionists in the Blue Grass State: “Save the nigger: save the country if you can, but—save the nigger. Hold on to slavery: hold on to the Union if you can, but—hold on to Slavery. Take care of your great domestic institution: take care of your liberties if you can, but—take care of your great domestic institution. … Damn Abe Lincoln and his Cabinet: help fight the rebels if that will keep your State from being overrun by them and your homes from pillage and your wives and daughters from ravishment, but—damn Abe Lincoln and his Cabinet. Call them fools, knaves, imbeciles, abolitionists, despots, anything you please that’s ugly: call upon them to protect you from invasion whenever invasion is threatened by the naked and hungry hordes under arms in Dixie who long for the flesh-pots on which you fatten, but—call them the hardest names your vocabulary can supply.”191

  In late March 1864, when a Kentucky delegation consisting of Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, former Senator Archibald Dixon, and newspaper editor Albert G. Hodges called at the White House, the president made a brief speech to them, which he subsequently wrote out at Hodges’s request. It was one of his most masterful public letters, addressing head-on their complaints about his policies. In it he sought to convince them that circumstances had forced him to liberate the slaves and employ blacks in the army. He began by frankly acknowledging his hostility to slavery. “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” But he insisted that his hatred for slavery had not determined his policies because he felt duty-bound to honor his oath of office: “I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery. I had publicly declared this many times, and in many ways. And I aver that, to this day, I have done no official act in mere deference to my abstract judgment and feeling on slavery. I did understand however, that my oath to preserve the constitution to the best of my ability, imposed upon me the duty of preserving, by every indispensable means, that government—that nation—of which that constitution was the organic law. Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the constitution? By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb. I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the constitution, through the preservation of the nation. Right or wrong, I assumed this ground, and now avow it. I could not feel that, to the best of my ability, I had even tried to preserve the constitution, if, to save slavery, or any minor matter, I should permit the wreck of government, country, and Constitution all together.”

  Lincoln reminded his callers that he had overruled emancipation orders by John C. Frémont in 1861 and David Hunter in 1862 and had objected to Simon Cameron’s call, in his 1861 annual report, for arming blacks. At the time, he thought there was no “indispensable necessity” for those measures. As a further indication of his essentially moderate approach to slavery, he cited his appeals in March, May, and July 1862 to the Border State delegations to accept compensated emancipation, for, he said, he “believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation, and arming the blacks would come, unless averted by that measure.” After they rejected his advice, he said he was “driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the latter.” That policy proved successful, for over a year after emancipation had been declared, the North had suffered “no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white military force,—no loss by it any how or any where. On the contrary, it shows a gain of quite a hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no cavilling. We have the men; and we could not have had them without the measure.”

  Lincoln challenged any Unionist “who complains of the measure” to “test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking these hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be but for the measure he condemns. If he can not face his case so stated, it is only because he can not face the truth.”

  In the letter to Hodges, Lincoln supplemented his earlier verbal remarks, for he wished the public to understand that the steps he took were to some extent necessitated by the will of the Almighty: “In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”192

  Divining the Divine Will

  Like his 1862 letter to Horace Greeley, this missive was a campaign document designed to reassure Moderates and Conservatives that the president was scrupulously obeying the Constitution and not willfully imposing his own ideological views on the public. Both letters have been misunderstood as profoundly revealing documents shedding light on Lincoln’s innermost thoughts and feelings. To be sure, the frank acknowledgment of his long-standing hatred of slavery was candid. But the implication that he was essentially
the plaything of forces beyond his control is misleading. Lincoln was a forceful leader who used the power of his office tactfully but assertively, recognizing with characteristic fatalism that while he could shape events up to a point, larger forces were at work than his own will. His attitude toward fate resembled what the twentieth-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr expressed in his “serenity prayer”: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  In September 1864, Lincoln told Eliza Gurney, a Quaker leader, of his belief in the power of the Almighty to shape events. “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise. We shall yet acknowledge His wisdom and our own error therein. Meanwhile we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.”193

  In a private memo, probably written in the summer of 1864, Lincoln ruminated on the Lord’s intentions. Dismayed by the terrible bloodshed of the stalled campaigns, he asked why a benevolent deity would allow it. “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.”194